Tour guide Hillary Marzec started conducting online tours of Chicago architecture shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard in March.
Equipped with master’s in comparative literature, she holds more than decade of experience as a river boat tour guide. Her passion is teaching about architecture and Chicago history. In 2014, she started Inside Chicago Walking Tours, but quickly saw the need to expand online when the virus struck.
On Tuesday night she ran a live one-hour Chicago River architecture virtual tour on Zoom sponsored by Blue Island Public Library that I attended as part of an online audience of 1,000 people from all over. Many people were turned away but the library has posted the tour for free online as a public service for a couple of weeks on Facebook and Youtube.
Marzec took many questions that were posted in text after her lecture. The actual presentation was filled with her own slides, but also her adept use of online maps of the city and satellite views. She kept her face out of it nearly 95% of the time and relied on graphics and pictures to help tell her story.
The reason to mention all this on Fierce Electronics is to show how effective online communication can be. It is a lesson for technology companies, too, that have long relied on online workplace meetings but usually seem to forget to recognize a much broader audience that can be reached with online tools.
The last time a tech-oriented presentation really caught my attention was when NASA’s Tom Soderstrom spoke at an in-person event sponsored by Computerworld in 2013. He dazzled the audience and never once used a long sentence bundled up with multiple clauses or five-syllable terms and confusing acronymns.
Does every tech company have such a speaker? And do they have a plan to convert to moving important presentations online? These are valid questions.
COVID-19 presents an opportunity for tech companies, especially, to recognize a few things about what R&D really means. Under the heading of “development,” tech companies could stand to beef up investments in who speaks as an evangelist for the science and engineering at their companies, as well as their industry segment writ large. A clue: it probably won’t be the CEO, because he or she is mostly worried about speaking fast at quarterly earnings calls to financial analysts, a specialized audience.
Instead, companies need online evangelists who can explain basic things about tech and remember that the audience can be very broad. That means all ages and levels of expertise quite often. If tech companies and their trade associations think their role is to lobby other experts or elected officials primarily, they might be missing the point.
So often, the tech industry forgets that the broader public is eventually going to shape science policy by their attitudes toward science. If engineers, researchers and academics talk down to us, we all miss out in terms of good will. If they talk above us, we get turned off. There’s a broad anti-intellectualism streak in America, and that is largely the fault of intellectuals who haven’t stepped down from their pedestals to share their insights. Companies focused solely on quarterly earnings might win a battle, but could lose the war to gain widespread support and respect.
Here’s one example: Has anybody in electronics tried lately to successfully explain what a transistor is and how it works? We see many press releases about chips with billions of transistors inside, but how does that actually function? Can you or another engineer tell anybody what a logic gate is or what binary means as the essence of today’s computing? I’d bet that Marzec could do a good job explaining all that, because she’s a communicator and would be willing to figure out how to study it and explain it. A good communicator isn’t necessarily a successful data scientist or programmer. Are you going to invent something amazing and not be able to explain it?
Another realization of watching Marzec’s presentation is how important visual communication can be. It always has been, back to the era of “The Medium is the Message.” Communications experts say the majority of communication is visual, and for online presentations, the visual elements are probably 90% of the message. If you are posting online slides that are cluttered and overly detailed, you are missing an opportunity to communicate your central message. And, if you are expecting attractive talking heads to convey your message, you might be working for Fox or CNN, but you are probably missing a bigger opportunity to persuade a larger audience.
Tech companies need to wake up to a couple of realities. First, online communications are here and need care and tending. Second, a lot of people who vote and pay taxes don’t care or understand the value of science and technology and are growing increasingly harder to persuade.
RELATED: Qualcomm lays out its smart transport vision, including vehicle prediction AI
Matt Hamblen is editor of Fierce Electronics.